Over coffee in the bar of a ritzy Toronto hotel, the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner explains that early in his career, as a genre-bending science fiction cult hero, he used to uphold the ideal that “true literature is timeless” only if “it has been purged of anything that would date it.” But his new novel, Dissident Gardens, a family saga that sprawls from 1950s New York to the present day, via East Germany, Nicaragua and (briefly) Toronto, is shot through with so many specific cultural references — from Bob Dylan to All in the Family — that future generations could use it to reconstruct a slice of 20th- and-21st-century history. It also takes in some of his own family history, although “improved,” he laughs, “out of sheer wishful thinking.”

Lethem, who retains a boyish mien despite his salt-and-pepper scruff, was born in Brooklyn in 1964; he says he wrote his 2003 bestseller, Fortress of Solitude, in part “to correct the fact that I was a very bad witness to the birth of hip hop in the 1970s.” He used his protagonist, Dylan Ebdus, to will himself back to that time and place, and through its character Rose, Dissident Gardens postulates what might have happened had his grandmother stayed in the Queens development Sunnyside Gardens, which was “so famous within leftist circles that it was something to brag about.”

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Lethem’s real-life grandmother spent most of her life in a “much more ethnically scrappy and undistinguished” area nearby; by putting Rose where the political action was, he explores the drive and the strife of the radical American left, including Communists who faced a crisis in 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Joseph Stalin. Each of his books, he explains, has offered a “field of distortion” that warps its depiction of reality, from magic realism in Fortress of Solitude to his lead character’s Tourette’s Syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn (1999) to an indie rock band’s lust and ambition in You Don’t Love Me Yet (2007); in Dissident Gardens, it’s utopianism. Rose, who is Jewish, takes a brave leap by embracing atheism, but then spends most of her time “looking for a new god to fill that vacuum” — for a while, it’s ideology. Lethem spent five years researching and writing the book (during which the famously prolific writer also published a novel, a collection of essays and monographs on the film They Live and Talking Heads’ album Fear of Music), and was led to reflect “how unbelievably American the American Communists were.”

For Lethem, “the United States is defined by everyone wanting to tear it apart and make it better; malcontent utopianism is the lifeblood of the American identity. Almost the first qualification for being an American who does anything more than just lie low and conform is to join up with some version of the disgruntled revolution, whether it’s the Tea Party or to become a Mormon or to run off to California” — in 2011, Lethem succeeded David Foster Wallace as professor of creative writing at Pomona College in Claremont — “and the Beats were in their own way into manifest destiny and a frontier of freedom; it was like a lifestyle gold rush.”

‘I think we’re all hipsters, but we’re embarrassed about it’

In Dissident Gardens, Rose’s daughter, Miriam, becomes something of a Beat herself, surrounded by young people who are trying desperately to fit into a Greenwich Village haunted by Bob Dylan and his cool, folkie counterparts. This can be read as a sly dig at modern-day Brooklyn hipsters, although Lethem professes affection for them, too: “We all are in a theatre of culture, a theatre of the self. I can be as irritated as anyone else at a nose ring or whatever, but present-day hipsters strike me as terribly human, very honest and vulnerable. They’re wearing on their sleeve what we mostly take the trouble to conceal — they are trying to be. I think by that definition we’re all hipsters, but we’re embarrassed about it.”

Lethem, who grew up among hippie activists in a Brooklyn commune, rebelled against his upbringing by rushing out to buy a leather jacket and pledge allegiance to punk in 1978: “It was my own little revolution.” Nowadays, he sees “beauty” in the stance of his character, Sergius, Miriam’s son, whose refusal to embrace any ideology is brave in “a world of violent absolutists.” For Lethem, Canadians’ sense of identity offers a meaningfully fluid contrast to the ironically rigid American “melting-pot” ideal. He lived partly in Toronto from 2000-02 (while married to local film executive Julia Rosenberg), and recently he’s been holed up there deliberating the Giller Prize (which he’s judging along with Margaret Atwood and Esi Edugyan — he’s intrigued by the many overlaps with crime writing in this year’s literary Canadian fiction). In Dissident Gardens, the city is seen through the eyes of an Irish immigrant in the ’50s working on “dull brick two-storeys” in “a vast mosaic of suburbs,” and reflecting that “few were the Canadians upon whom no greater claim of citizenship elsewhere lay.”

Lethem smiles at the quote. “I’m tough and affectionate towards everything.” This includes his own book, which he admits is so densely packed with ideas and images that “it’s consternating; it’s aggravating. There are plenty of people who want to throw it against the wall.” But in writing it, he says, “I was in the place where a writer most wants to be, right at the very edge of my talent. My nervous system ­— all the bumpers were lit up, like a pinball round where you earn extra points. Suddenly [it was] like a large container opened up and I could pour all of these different turbulent thoughts and feelings. They all fit, so I’d done something right.”